


What Rough Beast

by themousewitch



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale has Feelings, Aziraphale hates selling things, Crowley is Bad at Feelings (Good Omens), I had no idea what to name this, M/M, Things have gotten Serious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-11 23:16:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20554295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themousewitch/pseuds/themousewitch
Summary: Aziraphale has Feelings.It's all very surprising, okay?





	What Rough Beast

**Author's Note:**

> I saw this gorgeous fanart (and the tags! oh, the tags!) by tumblr user mundycide: https://mundycide.tumblr.com/post/187262407611/freedom-to-love-sequel-to-this-art-i-made-a-few
> 
> And was immediately inspired to write this. Enjoy!

It didn’t occur to him right away, the scope and the breadth of the _freedom_ that was available to them. That was something that crept in on little cat feet. Or would have, if the cat in question was the size of most basketball players and equipped with large, wickedly sharp teeth.

It would be more accurate to say that the realization stalked him for days, and then ambushed him at the first watering hole.

There were a small multitude of reasons for this, the chief among them being that Aziraphale had spent 6,000 years believing he didn’t have any freedom whatsoever. Angels weren’t _supposed_ to have free will. They weren’t supposed to have a choice, that was the whole point of well … everything.

After 6,000 years of comfortable resignation to that lack of choice, it was something of a shock to find out that free will had stuck to him the way that water most certainly did _not_ to ducks.

Breathing space, Crowley had said. _Our side_, he had said, and Aziraphale had been too blinded by his own belief to see it.

How long had Crowley known?

\--

Aziraphale opened the bookshop, partly because it was what he’d done for more than a century and partly (not that he was admitting this) because it was where Crowley knew where to find him.

Crowley was off … wherever Crowley was. Before, it would have been Aziraphale’s business to know and thwart. Now, it wasn’t.

He was probably sleeping, the bastard, Aziraphale thought the way he always thought such things—with the kind of habitual fondness that rubs the velvet off at the buttons of your favorite waistcoat, if your favorite waistcoat was something you could only ever wear alone and in the dark lest someone see you with it and send you and the waistcoat off to your painful, gruesome deaths.

But, Aziraphale thought idly, he was allowed to be fond now. They’d already survived their own gruesome deaths. They were both free of the machinations of Hell and Heaven alike.

Realization pounced like a predator of old.

“You all have to leave now,” Aziraphale said desperately to the handful of customers that had been browsing under his distracted (but disapproving) eye. “We’re closed. I’ve just come down with the most terrible headache.”

\--

Three days later, Crowley stalked into the bookshop and the door obediently shut and locked itself behind him.

“Where have you been, angel?” he demanded. “I have been calling!”

Crowley gestured around himself angrily and Aziraphale thought _Oh!_ The last time he hadn’t been available to answer the phone, he had been arguing with the Quartermaster in Heaven while his shop burned to the ground.

Aziraphale stood shakily. He had no idea what do say or do now that everything and nothing had changed.

“Kiss me?” he said more question than command, and Crowley didn’t hesitate, didn’t give him any time at all to take it back, just took off his sunglasses and kissed Aziraphale like both their lives might have depended on it.

Aziraphale clung to him just as desperately. He let Crowley push him back and down into the overstuffed couch, pulled Crowley into his lap, and just as the kiss gentled into something softer, Crowley pulled back and demanded, “Why now?”

“What?” said Aziraphale, quite perplexed. His head and almost every other part of his body was spinning pleasantly.

“Adam rebooted the entire bloody world. He defied Satan himself! He could have changed anything or anyone,” Crowley hissed. “Tell me _why_, angel. Why now?”

“They would have killed you!” Even as he said it, it hit Aziraphale like a punch in the gut. This was the thing he’d feared most, the reason all their silences and companionable lunches had gone carefully unexamined. It was the reason he’d lived with the phantom tsunami of love and doubt and pants-shitting terror for millennia, the reason he had tried so hard to _believe_ in ineffable plans, the reason he had come screaming back to earth to possess person after person until he’d found Madame Tracy.

It wasn’t just the world he loved; it was Crowley, too.

Crowley, whose brow wrinkled with concern, head tilting cautiously.

Aziraphale sat up straighter, eyes wild. “No, really! It would have been holy water for you if we’d. If we … They would have destroyed you, Crowley! I couldn’t have. I can’t. I-” He swallowed, blinking back tears. How could he explain that he would rather suffer at a distance for thousands more years than to have Crowley taken forever beyond his reach?

Crowley reeled him in closer, gathering the pieces of Aziraphale close and muttering, “Shit, shit, shit, I am _so bad _at this.” under his breath. Aziraphale gasped damply and turned his face into Crowley’s shirt. They _would_ have used holy water, the bastards, and Crowley had to know it because he’d seen what Heaven had tried to do to Aziraphale.

After what might have been a few minutes or a few hours, Crowley spoke.

“I am entirely out of my depth here,” he said, almost gently. “But I am here. I am right here, angel. What do you need?”

Aziraphale clutched back tightly. “You,” he managed after a moment, closing his eyes tightly against the suddenly very urgent possibility that he had badly miscalculated. “I want _you._”

Crowley’s arms shifted around Aziraphale, pulling him in even more tightly. He kissed Aziraphale’s hair.

“I was always yours,” Crowley said.

“_Fuck._”

“Angel!” Crowley laughed delightedly.

“You really are terrible at this, you know,” Aziraphale said.

“I know.”

Aziraphale listened to Crowley’s heartbeat under his ear, calmed his own to match it. Sniffled discreetly.

“It’s all right,” he said finally. “We’ll figure it out together.”

“Together,” Crowley agreed, and kissed him again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I had no idea what to title this, so you get a Yeats reference. (Yay! Boo! At least it's not The Author Has Declined to Title This Work!)
> 
> Again, please go look at this gorgeous picture and have all the feelings with me (and Aziraphale): https://mundycide.tumblr.com/post/187262407611/freedom-to-love-sequel-to-this-art-i-made-a-few


End file.
